I'm rewatching these Game Room quick looks because I went on a drunken bender a couple days ago and ended up spending $30 on Game Room shit because I thought it'd be funny. That is 1/2 of my entire fun budget for the month.

I'm rewatching these Game Room quick looks because I went on a drunken bender a couple days ago and ended up spending $30 on Game Room shit because I thought it'd be funny. That is 1/2 of my entire fun budget for the month.

" A room filled to the brim with games. The eating animation in Food Fight is always disturbing. Game Room kill screen comin' up! Missing In Action comes across as rad in an awful sort of way; the best kind of rad. Nice work with the phone call there. I hate how so many of these old ass games have a billion things going on when you check the controls. Sweet lord, they really need to stop putting out paddle games for this. Or... release way more. Finally it just gets to some dudes hanging out talking about games and having a decent time. Now this is what I call a Quick Look. "

Actually I don't think it's a kill screen. I think what happened is that due to memory limitation of the hardware back when the game came out the data the game stores for the instant replay in memory looped back to the starting address due to too much data being written and causing it to send corrupt data and throw an error. This is my guess why the dude was trying to use up all the food and take as long as he possibly could to get to the ice cream cone. By taking so long and doing so much stuff he is causing the game to write a bunch of data to some RAM [real or emulated] that has a set amount of allotted space so that he can cause it to start writing data back to the starting address and corrupt the replay data by having something that is not what is expected in the first address. [probably some header or initilization data]

This makes sense as it references RAM and ROM as being ok and the NVRAM (where highscores would be stored), which is probably some kind of debug screen for the programmers who made this game. Since it is showing that they are ok it also implies that it's a problem with corrupt information and not the actual hardware. (again real or emulated)

It's likely the 20,000,000 points being set in the high score register is some kind of flag/indicator that the programmers used in debugging the Instant Replay to indicate that something is wrong.

I imagine it would be fairly time consuming for the developers behind game room to change the design of the Instant Replay feature in Food Fight to accomodate a much much larger amount of memory so that this would not be any kind of real problem. (Hint: it's much more complex than just changing some paramater to implement that change.) So spending the resources to do such a thing would be incredabily wasteful given the relatively small probability this would become an issue. Also seeing as it's pretty obvious what the result is of someone exploiting this, if they seriously cared about the leaderboards it would be much easier and way less time consuming or resource draining to take away someone's position on the leaderboard who exploited this bug than going into changing something like that in the game. If they don't than well I guess dude who's exploiting limitations of the game will still be at the top probably.

Hey Jeff and Ryan. Thanks for explaining why you dislike Game Room. I figured you were just beeing droll mouthpieces, but you laid it out pretty well. Either way, if Game Room ends, it was a good ride to watch some bad gameplay. A true endurance run. I don't have a 360, so I never was able to try out these games. The horrible translation of controls sounded exagerated until you guys actually went into detail with an actual game industry person on this episode. Now it is so much more clear.